By Scott Drake, Chief Product Officer, SymTrain
If you’ve ever heard a great contact center agent navigate a difficult conversation, you know what sets them apart. It usually isn’t that they know the perfect response. They listen, recognize what’s happening, understand what the customer is really asking, and adapt their approach to a resolution.
For years, SymTrain has helped learners build those skills through spaced practice that takes them through increasing levels of difficulty, closing the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it. But that work kept leading us back to one question: how do you prepare someone for a conversation when you don’t know exactly where that conversation is going to go?
That question is a big part of why we built Dynamic Syms.
The real conversation rarely follows a predetermined path
Learning starts with knowing and develops through structured practice. Whether someone is learning a new process or a new system, or reinforcing the fundamentals of a customer interaction they’ve handled for years, structure matters. That is exactly what our Guided Syms are designed to provide. Guided Syms give agents a safe environment to learn a process, practice important language, understand the workflow, and build confidence through repetition.
But eventually, a real customer shows up, and the agent needs to be ready for both the expected and the unexpected. That customer might interrupt, raise an unusual objection, give an unexpected answer, become frustrated about something completely different, or ask a question that wasn’t part of any training scenario. At that point, the agent has to move beyond knowing the process and begin applying what they know in the moment.
That transition from knowing how to perform the process to handling, and owning, the situation is where Dynamic Syms come in.
Building practice around the way conversations actually happen
The idea behind Dynamic Syms is simple: in addition to guiding the learner along a predetermined path, we give them a scenario and an AI customer voice that responds to what they actually say. The conversation develops in real time. There isn’t one canned response the learner has to uncover or one “correct” path through the interaction. Two agents can begin with the same scenario and end up having completely different conversations because the AI customer voice agent responds contextually to each of them. That is much closer to the reality of the job, and it changes the kind of practice the agent is getting.
Instead of perfecting a single path, they are practicing the judgment required to handle a real customer interaction that could go in many directions. This becomes especially important with skills that are difficult to develop through classroom instruction alone, including:
- Objection handling
- Discovery and active listening
- Empathy and communication
- De-escalation
- Handling edge cases and unexpected situations
- Working with different customer personas
- Knowing when to keep investigating and when to move toward resolution
- Applying new policies or procedures when the interaction does not follow the expected path
Take objection handling as an example. You can teach someone the most common objections and have them practice recommended responses, and that has real value. But knowing how to respond to an objection is different from recognizing it in a live conversation, sometimes combined with other objections, understanding what is behind it, and responding naturally.
Those skills develop through practice that is spaced, varied, and mixes different skills, topics, and customer behaviors, usually over more than one attempt. Used together with Guided Syms, Dynamic Syms give agents a safe place to build and refresh those skills, and the confidence to use them, before they have to do it with a live customer.
See it in action:
Measuring how the agent handled the conversation
A dynamic simulation also changes the way we think about measurement. With a single, predetermined path, it makes sense to measure accuracy, empathy, and mastery: does the learner know the process, can they perform it, and how consistently? That still matters. But when there isn’t one predetermined path, the goal can’t simply be to determine whether the agent said the expected sentence. So organizations can also look at whether agents demonstrated the behaviors and skills that matter throughout the interaction. For example:
- Did they listen and respond to what the customer actually said?
- Did they ask the right questions?
- Did they understand the customer’s concern?
- Did they demonstrate the expected communication behaviors?
- Did they handle objections appropriately?
- Did they move the conversation toward the right outcome?
That gives trainers, managers, and coaches a more complete picture of readiness than simply knowing someone completed a course or followed a scripted flow. They can see not only whether an agent has mastered specific behaviors and processes, but whether they can apply them when the conversation changes direction, and where in the conversation someone needs more practice. Then they can give that person another chance to work on the skill.
Guided and Dynamic Syms work together
We don’t see Dynamic Syms as a replacement for Guided Syms. They address different stages and types of development, and they work best together. Guided Syms provide the structure someone needs to learn how to perform a process, build foundational skills, and develop consistency in their skills and behaviors. Dynamic Syms give them the opportunity to apply those skills in situations that are less predictable. Combining the two lets organizations build learning pathways tailored to each agent, based on what they need to practice and when.
A new agent might begin with a Guided Sym that walks them through a defined customer interaction. A tenured agent might use a Guided Sym to sharpen a specific recommended behavior within a limited amount of weekly practice time. Either one may also need a Dynamic Sym, where the customer can push back, change direction, raise an unexpected concern, or respond in a way that requires the agent to make a judgment. That is why we believe every agent’s development needs both.
That progression mirrors the way adults build expertise: crawl, walk, run. They acquire knowledge, learn to perform the fundamentals, practice across increasing levels of complexity, apply those skills in increasingly realistic and varied scenarios, and keep practicing, mixing skills, topics, and customer personas, until those skills become something they can rely on.
Practice doesn’t stop after onboarding
I’m particularly excited about how Dynamic Syms can enable solutions beyond new-hire training. A tenured agent might be struggling with a specific type of objection. A new policy might change how a team is expected to handle an interaction. QA data might show that agents need to improve their discovery or empathy. A new product might introduce customer conversations the workforce hasn’t handled before. Each of those situations, along with the analytics and performance scores that surface them, creates a reason to practice again, continuously.
That connects directly to the broader idea we are building at SymTrain: Practice Makes Progress. We believe practice should continue as the job evolves and new performance needs arise. Real calls, QA findings, policies, business changes, and performance data can all serve as signals to determine what an agent should practice next.
Dynamic Syms are an important part of that progression because they allow practice to become more realistic and more varied as the agent develops. The goal is not to teach someone a perfect answer to every possible customer interaction. It is to give them enough meaningful practice that when the unexpected happens, they are ready to respond.
